Engaging With Your Resellers: Top 5 Benefits of a Partner Advisory Board

The Gist

• Revenue boost. Partner advisory boards expose untapped revenue opportunities by understanding partner operations.
• Bottleneck removal. PABs help identify and resolve roadblocks hindering product sales.
• Competitor insight. PABs provide valuable knowledge on competitor products and strategies.

Many of the same benefits of hosting customer advisory boards (CABs) — uncovering strategic business insights, expanding product opportunities, deepening customer relationships, increasing revenue, etc. — can also be enjoyed through well-run partner advisory boards (PABs). After all, for those companies that sell their products and services indirectly through channel partners, value-added resellers, distributors or other third parties, like customers, these allies will be crucial to their overall business success.

Partner Advisory Boards: Enhancing Engagement & Understanding With Resellers

While some companies have robust programs to engage with their resellers, it’s more common in our experience for partner outreach to be scarce, sporadic and one-way. As a result, it’s also typical for resellers to feel unheard, disconnected and even ignored — and certainly not performing up to their maximum potential. In turn, companies may simply not have a strong understanding of how their partners operate, what they need to be successful and how they can sell more solutions.

Related Article: 5 Reasons You Need a Customer Advisory Board

As such, here are the Top 5 benefits of a partner advisory board:

Top 5 Benefits: How Partner Advisory Boards Boost Business

1. Increase revenue: Initiating a formal PAB made up of executives from your best partners will allow you to learn about their operations — where they focus in the marketplace, the challenges they face, who their end-user customers are — and uncover and unlock revenue opportunities. Your partners will have direct, firsthand experience with the daily challenges faced by your product users, various uses of your solutions and how they are being successful with them. Understanding your partners and hearing their insights and suggestions for better serving end users can lead to learning material, net-new revenue opportunities for your company.
2. Remove bottlenecks: By learning insights into your partners’ operations, PABs offer excellent opportunities to uncover roadblocks that may be restricting the sale of your company’s products. Often, such bottlenecks are simple communications issues, lack of product understanding or other “easy fixes” that can be remedied cheaply and quickly, leading to significant revenue opportunities once resolved.
3. Discover product insights: Your PAB will also reveal how your partners communicate, position and sell your products, and unique and innovative ways your end-users are benefitting from them. Such insights may lead to further developing such product capabilities or communicating such benefits to your other partners and customers. Your PAB will almost certainly uncover additional capabilities your resellers would like to see added to your solutions in order to sell more of them, and help you prioritize your product feature roadmap — just as your CAB would do.
4. Improve messaging: In addition to discovering communications issues between you and your resellers, your PAB members will convey how they position your products to their end-users. These insights can be valuable in learning how you can help your partners communicate your value proposition, so you can better do so to other partners and your customers as a whole. Again, such messaging “tweaks” can be relatively easy to make, and can resonate better with your end users, making your solutions more desirable to them.
5. Understand competition: Your products are likely not the only ones your partners are selling to your end-users — they may also be reselling your competitors’ solutions as well. As such, PABs are excellent opportunities to understand your competitors’ products’ strengths and weaknesses, how they are sold, messaged and used by customers — and opportunities for you to outmaneuver your competitors and increase your own products’ mindshare with your resellers and with their customers.

Related Article: Launching a Customer Advisory Board: Top 10 Questions to Ask

Embracing PABs: A Game-Changer for Collaborative Success

Partner advisory boards present an excellent opportunity for companies to engage with their resellers, learn new revenue opportunities, improve product use and communication and beat the competition.

In fact, PABs really are a “must-have” for any company that relies on partners or resellers to represent, communicate, sell or support their solutions and services — and make material difference in their overall success in the marketplace.

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